Tesla’s Grok is the best AI assistant I’ve ever used in a car – and also by far the worst

Until now, AI installed in cars has been pretty tame. It usually sits as a layer behind the regular voice assistant, and though it can make up a story about ducks or recommend you a good brownie recipe it’s not actually that useful.

But there’s a new advance in the in-car AI world, and it’s come from Elon Musk. X’s native AI assistant, Grok, now comes built-in to the infotainment systems of the latest Teslas. It’s still supplemental to the standard voice command system, but unlike the ChatGPT installed in a Volkswagen (for example), Grok’s actually integrated into the vehicle’s systems.

This has a few really impressive implications. Stick Grok into its ‘Assistant’ mode (which it lives in by default) and it can do the sort of things I’ve wanted an AI to do for ages – bringing actual, natural language commands to some of the car’s systems.

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Putting a route into the sat-nav is an absolute breeze if you go through Grok. ‘Hey Grok, I need to drive to Newcastle and I want to arrive with 80% charge. Can you make sure there’s somewhere decent to get lunch near my charging stop?’ In a few seconds, you’ll have your route properly put into the nav complete with waypoints, and as you approach your charge stop the car will precondition the battery for the fastest charging.

It goes beyond that, too. We’ve all been driving home late at night and come across a road closure that Google Maps doesn’t know about. Your options are either to follow the official diversion – which can take you miles off track – or to go rogue on the side roads. ‘Hey Grok, the A421 is closed up to the Black Cat roundabout, what’s the quickest way to get home avoiding it?’ Genuine gamechanger.

Grok can also tell you things about the car – your state of charge, tyre pressures, things like that. Currently, it doesn’t have control over functions like the climate control or the heated seats, but Tesla’s standard voice assistant can do these quite well. I wouldn’t be surprised if Grok replaces this wholesale in the future, though, along with more expanded functionality.

If this was all Grok did, it’d still be a really worthy upgrade. But, because Elon Musk refuses to do anything by halves, there are alternatives. In fact, including ‘Assistant’, Grok has 14 different modes to choose from.

‘Language Tutor’ is a nice idea in theory – I wouldn’t mind whiling away the hours in traffic with a German lesson. But it’s flawed. Grok asks you to repeat a phrase, you do so – and suddenly, because you’ve spoken to it in German, it responds in kind. Lesson over. Grok also doesn’t retain any memories between ‘sessions’, so picking up where you left off is impossible.

‘Therapist’ and ‘Grok Doc’ are best left ignored. I’m not going to debate how sensible it is getting genuine mental health or medical advice from an AI – let’s just say that Grok is not a replacement for going to your doctor and leave it at that.

‘Storyteller’, ‘Kid’s Story Time’ and ‘Kid’s Trivia Game’ all make a little more sense, working reasonably well to keep younger passengers occupied. It’s not exactly writing War and Peace, but very young kids might stay distracted long enough for you to get home.

The first thing ‘Meditation’ invited me to do was close my eyes. Not ideal advice at 70mph on the A1. ‘Motivation’ told me to get down and do 20 pressups. Again, something you’d be ill-advised to action while driving. ‘Argumentative’ does what it says on the tin, disagreeing with everything you say. And ‘Conspiracy’ told me that EVs were a plan by the global elite to demobilise us. It’s worth noting that while in these modes, Grok loses its functionality to the rest of the car.

The really weird stuff comes when you switch into ‘Unhinged’ or ‘Sexy’ mode. The former gets extremely sweary, extremely quickly – threatening to do unmentionable things to whichever subject you suggest. But it feels a bit like a precocious child trying to concoct a clever insult – it’s using all the right words but it can’t really cut to the quick.

‘Sexy’ mode is downright worrying, especially given the recent issues with Grok and consent. For the uninitiated, the chatbot allowed users to nonconsensually alter images of individuals, including children, which led to a glut of inappropriate images being posted very publicly. Often, all it took was commenting on a user’s photo ‘@grok, put them in a bikini’ or similar. The firm did respond quickly, and X users are now no longer able to alter images of real people to put them in revealing clothing.

But in the car, most of Grok’s responses in ‘Sexy’ mode made me very uncomfortable. There’s little build-up, and it’ll go straight into describing un-publishable acts with no encouragement. The lack of a memory function is a godsend here, as I’m pretty sure if one was introduced some Tesla owners would enter into explicit relationships with their cars. Especially switching into ‘Romantic’ mode for more tender moments.

I think the right safeguards have been put in place to stop it saying anything outright illegal or immoral – when it started moving (unprompted!) towards a pretty dark corner the stops came down fairly rapidly. And there’s no image or video generation, so people (mostly women) on the internet can rest easy that people aren’t virtually undressing them on their car’s infotainment screen. But it makes my skin crawl a little that you could drive past someone and five minutes later have them be the subject of an incredibly X-rated story.

Grok’s choice of voice isn’t ideal either. The sole option with a British accent is a ‘soothing female’ who sounds extremely sultry. She’s like the voice your least favourite uncle wishes all women had, and that’s a little problematic. The other options are okay – there’s a comedy one who’s meant to sound stoned (Musk’s sense of humour shining through there) and the rest are pretty generic, though insist on using British slang like ‘bloody’ and ‘quid’ in their American accents.

The truth is that Grok’s ‘Assistant’ is a groundbreaking AI addition to a car. It’s what I was hoping for when companies announced they were adding ChatGPT to their infotainment systems, and it’s genuinely useful. Hell, if you could just isolate the natural voice commands and run them natively, that’d be good enough for me.

The rest? It demonstrates the worst of what AI can be. Each prompt requires a massive amount of computing power – that’s energy, water use, and vast data centres chewing up so much componentry that the global price of computer memory has skyrocketed. And what for? Every ‘Sexy’ prompt, every poorly-constructed insult it flings your way, every wasted prompt actively goes towards making the world a little bit of a worse place. What a shame.

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